Absolute beginner!

[Tony Jackson]

Hi R C-R

Yes, a friend pointed out  the transparency feature.  I've occasionally come across it in GC, but basically I mostly work from scans, so there is nothing transparent about my work unles something makes it transparent.  It arose seldom enough in GC that I don't think I ever got around to 'challenging' it.

In the present case it covered a lot of my image, and made it harder to assess how it was going.  One thing which is critical to the usefulness of this kind of file is that the different lines be followable, even at low magnification.  With the transparency over/underlay this was much harder to judge.  And although I'd set all the colours to legible levels in the original, Photo changed them all as soon as I used it to open the file, so putting this right was quite a high priority (and something of an annoyance!)

Anyway, my 'tablecloth' is dealt with (easily, in the event).  The colour problem seems to be a good bit trickier.  I can't believe it is that complicated, but despite a good many hours of tutorial watching, experimentation on the image, and evidently pissing some people off with questions which seem inane to them I still have a muddy image with colours I cannot change, in what must be the simplest image most of you have ever seen!

I chose Photo because GC (which I've used for 20 years or so) became less and less competent at the sort of work I do – I'm still using quite an old version, having bought and ditched a later, less competent one.  I'm sure diagrams are a minority interest, compared with sci-fi dream-images or w.h.y, and my concern to keep the character of old documents likewise.  Still, clear and accurate information, legibly presented, is surely not to be despised, and in principle such as Photo is a suitable platform on which to do this work?

Thanks for your patience!

Best regards, Tony.

[firstdefence]

Made a short video to show selecting colours and changing them.

[Tony Jackson]

Hi firstdefence, thanks for doing this!

... Well, I composed a few paragraphs of reply ...

Took a little while to discover that double-clicking the video made it go full screen (I couldn't see what you were doing, or read the text etc).  Clicking on the 'shrink-back-down' button at the bottom right made it shrink again.  And in the process, deleted everything I'd written in the last half hour.

The main thing that I'm trying to do is to select a number of non-contiguous occurrences of a colour, then choose/make a colour more like the one I originally made and used and saved as a .png (not in Photo), but which Photo 'corrected' when I imported the file into Photo.  Then copy the desired colour into the space occupied by the undesired one.  What you have done is to spread the smudgified Photo colour further, by copying it into the colour panel (yours looks very different from mine, with its groups of sixteen progressively less bright colours), and then selecting another place (a red line) and filling that with the bad green.

I've been trying to recreate a suitable colour in the colour panel, then copy *my* colour into the drawing.   Any time I click on the drawing the colour panel reverts to the smudgified Photo colour, or sometimes an even more smudgified one.  I can't believe it is too hard to get the process to work constructively, but so far ...

But thanks for your patient efforts!

Best regards, Tony.

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, Tony Jackson said:

... the colour panel (yours looks very different from mine ...

Not that it makes any difference in picking colors, but note that @firstdefence has the Swatches panel open, not the Color panel. That's why it looks different from what you see.

As I said before, you really need to spend some time learning the basics before tackling any project as complex as this one. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for nearly endless frustration.

[Alfred]

40 minutes ago, Tony Jackson said:

... deleted everything I'd written in the last half hour.

 If you’re composing a lengthy reply, it’s a good idea to use TextEdit or similar so that you don’t lose it all when your browser decides to misbehave.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

 If you’re composing a lengthy reply, it’s a good idea to use TextEdit or similar so that you don’t lose it all when your browser decides to misbehave.

Also, if you are using Safari (& perhaps other desktop browsers but I have not checked with any others), you can right-click on a video to get a popup menu which includes several display options like "Enter Full Screen Mode" & "Open Video in New Tab" that will not interfere with the reply editor.

[Tony Jackson]

On 5/30/2020 at 12:28 PM, R C-R said:

Also, if you are using Safari (& perhaps other desktop browsers but I have not checked with any others), you can right-click on a video to get a popup menu which includes several display options like "Enter Full Screen Mode" & "Open Video in New Tab" that will not interfere with the reply editor.

 I have saved to TextEdit in the past, although this hasn't been a problem recently.  I use Firefox, which has a similar function I think (but I couldn't find it just now!)

Meanwhile, quite good progress.  I've not found any way to be clear about exactly how it works, but I've managed, one way or another, to make a reasonable fist of the colours in my diagram.  It usualy takes a fair while to select a colour for use in such a way as for it to be useable for colouring part of the diagram – I can't find any source of a logic about it – particularly the small magnifying glass in the Colour panel seems almost invariably when clicked upon to return the coloured circles to what I'm trying to avoid, but so far I've always managed to trick it into changing to the chosen colour eventually, but I still haven't spotted what the critical step is!

The biggest leap forward was the discovery (helped by a friend) that I had a load of layers running.  I carefully examined them all and turfed them out, excepting the main one, which I gave a name to.  (First I flattened a layer with a pasted detail into the main layer).  And now all the things which seldom or never worked usually work.  The one peculiar stumbling block is copy and paste.  At the beginning of this experience I was making good use of this, but now any time I paste (into the obligatory new layer) the element I've copied is jpegged, with all its clarity gone.  Worse, when I try to strip the noise by hand and replace it with nice clean pixels the program adds spurious jpeg-style noise outboard of it.  I did make a letter J with the pixel tool to overcome such a difficulty, but it took a long time.  Clearly something has changed, but the help system on 'paste' stops with an illustration of the command in a menu.  I'll attach the diagram as it now is – took a long time to create and persuade the program to accept a yellow which was sufficiently visible, and I shall experiment with the brown when I get more confident with the colour use process.  I'm using Flood Select/Flood fill, which works fine, the difficulty is persuading the colour panel to accept my choice.  Incidentally the help system clearly has a colour panel which is quite a bit different from mine.  I dare say that this is because it can't imagine any one being happy with 8-bit?  Of course on a file like mine, with nine colours (if you include black and white) the merit is all in file size and ease of manipulation, so 8-bit is plenty!

Best regards, Tony.

Wiring+1ap.afphoto

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Tony Jackson said:

It usualy takes a fair while to select a colour for use in such a way as for it to be useable for colouring part of the diagram – I can't find any source of a logic about it – particularly the small magnifying glass in the Colour panel seems almost invariably when clicked upon to return the coloured circles to what I'm trying to avoid ...

To choose a color with the magnifying glass eyedropper in the Colour panel, you drag it & place it over the color you want. That places it in the small color well. You can then click it to set either the foreground or background color, depending on which one is frontmost on the Color panel.

Again, this is explained in the Color Panel help topic. Please, as a courtesy to those of us trying to help you, take the time to study the suggested help pages -- all you need to do is click on the links we have taken the time to add to our replies.

Edited June 1, 2020 by R C-R
fixed as per Walt's comment

[walt.farrell]

Magnifying glass?

[Tony Jackson]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

To choose a color with the magnifying glass eyedropper in the Colour panel, you drag it & place it over the color you want.

Silly me, I imagined, like the one on the other side of the screen, I had to click on it and then click on the thing I wanted it to take up.  That was the missing clue.  I spent about 40 mins on the colour panel page this morning without spotting it - partly because I believed I should (but couldn't) find the "HSL Colour wheel.  No matter, yours was the clue I needed.

Now the only real blockage is the weird jpeg effect when I cut and paste...

Thanks for you help!

Best, Tony.

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

 

[Tony Jackson]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Magnifying glass?

Well, it is round, you see different things through it, it is not long and thin like a telescope, it is accurately round, so probably not a vegetable thing.  Could have been a porthole, I suppose, but a porthole sees just one thing nearly all day. There's something which looks like an eye-dropper beside it, which I suppose implies disease ..?

[Tony Jackson]

Good morning all!

A surprising silence on the topic of the messed-up paste!

So I asked a professional user friend (he does instruction manuals for white goods, among other things).  Seems he couldn't persuade Photo to paste something clean-edged which he copied, allthough the same action came out fine in Photoshop.  Very hard to believe, but is this a bug?

I had a closer look at a paste on the diagram this morning.  The blurring seems to have added a grey row of pixels sideways, but not vertically.  So my letter N has a single-pixel grey line all around it, except at the top and bottom of the two vertical lines.

So I did a little experiment:  I drew a single-pixel-width vertical line, ten pixels long.  Copy and paste, then Move to move the copied lline sideways.  I now had two vertical lines, both sharp.  I then copied a nearby block of six pixels width and nine pixels height, but with  only the bottom six pixels full width, then two pixels height at four pixels wide, and one more pixel of height at two pixels wide.  Copy-paste-move, and out slides a block whose original width has been reduced by one pixel, but to which has been added one pixel-worth of grey at each side (nothing at top or bottom.)

I'm pretty sure it is not a bug, because I have details which I copied and pasted earlier on in this odyssey, and they look clean and clear.  Can any one help with this?

Best regards, Tony

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, Tony Jackson said:

Good morning all!

A surprising silence on the topic of the messed-up paste!

So I asked a professional user friend (he does instruction manuals for white goods, among other things).  Seems he couldn't persuade Photo to paste something clean-edged which he copied, allthough the same action came out fine in Photoshop.  Very hard to believe, but is this a bug?

I had a closer look at a paste on the diagram this morning.  The blurring seems to have added a grey row of pixels sideways, but not vertically.  So my letter N has a single-pixel grey line all around it, except at the top and bottom of the two vertical lines.

So I did a little experiment:  I drew a single-pixel-width vertical line, ten pixels long.  Copy and paste, then Move to move the copied lline sideways.  I now had two vertical lines, both sharp.  I then copied a nearby block of six pixels width and nine pixels height, but with  only the bottom six pixels full width, then two pixels height at four pixels wide, and one more pixel of height at two pixels wide.  Copy-paste-move, and out slides a block whose original width has been reduced by one pixel, but to which has been added one pixel-worth of grey at each side (nothing at top or bottom.)

I'm pretty sure it is not a bug, because I have details which I copied and pasted earlier on in this odyssey, and they look clean and clear.  Can any one help with this?

Best regards, Tony

Without some screenshots (or, better, a sample  .afphoto document) to demonstrate the problem it's hard to make any meaningful comments.

Also, it might be better to start a new topic, with a meaningful title.

[Tony Jackson]

Hi Walt,

Done!  See "Cut and paste differences"

Best regards, Tony